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Welcome


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Welcome to the Computer Vision Group at RWTH Aachen University!

The Computer Vision group has been established at RWTH Aachen University in context with the Cluster of Excellence "UMIC - Ultra High-Speed Mobile Information and Communication" and is associated with the Chair Computer Sciences 8 - Computer Graphics, Computer Vision, and Multimedia. The group focuses on computer vision applications for mobile devices and robotic or automotive platforms. Our main research areas are visual object recognition, tracking, self-localization, 3D reconstruction, and in particular combinations between those topics.

We offer lectures and seminars about computer vision and machine learning.

You can browse through all our publications and the projects we are working on.

Important information for the Wintersemester 2023/2024: Unfortunately the following lectures are not offered in this semester: a) Computer Vision 2 b) Advanced Machine Learning

News

CVPR'25

We have one paper accepted at Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2025!

May 5, 2025

ICRA'25

We have four papers at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). See you all in Atlanta!

Feb. 20, 2025

WACV'25

Our work "Fine-Tuning Image-Conditional Diffusion Models is Easier than You Think" has been accepted at WACV'25.

Nov. 18, 2024

IROS'24

Our work "Look Gauss, No Pose: Novel View Synthesis using Gaussian Splatting without Accurate Pose Initialization" has been accepted at IROS'24.

July 30, 2024

CVPR'24

We have two papers accepted at the 2024 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR):

We have two papers accepted at Workshops:

Feb. 27, 2024

ICRA'24

Our Mask4Former approach has been accepted at the 2024 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA):

Feb. 5, 2024

Recent Publications

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Fine-Tuning Image-Conditional Diffusion Models is Easier than You Think

Winter Conference on Computer Vision (WACV) 2025

Recent work showed that large diffusion models can be reused as highly precise monocular depth estimators by casting depth estimation as an image-conditional image generation task. While the proposed model achieved state-of-the-art results, high computational demands due to multi-step inference limited its use in many scenarios. In this paper, we show that the perceived inefficiency was caused by a flaw in the inference pipeline that has so far gone unnoticed. The fixed model performs comparably to the best previously reported configuration while being more than 200x faster. To optimize for downstream task performance, we perform end-to-end fine-tuning on top of the single-step model with task-specific losses and get a deterministic model that outperforms all other diffusion-based depth and normal estimation models on common zero-shot benchmarks. We surprisingly find that this fine-tuning protocol also works directly on Stable Diffusion and achieves comparable performance to current state-of-the-art diffusion-based depth and normal estimation models, calling into question some of the conclusions drawn from prior works.

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Interactive4D: Interactive 4D LiDAR Segmentation

International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2025

Interactive segmentation has an important role in facilitating the annotation process of future LiDAR datasets. Existing approaches sequentially segment individual objects at each LiDAR scan, repeating the process throughout the entire sequence, which is redundant and ineffective. In this work, we propose interactive 4D segmentation, a new paradigm that allows segmenting multiple objects on multiple LiDAR scans simultaneously, and Interactive4D, the first interactive 4D segmentation model that segments multiple objects on superimposed consecutive LiDAR scans in a single iteration by utilizing the sequential nature of LiDAR data. While performing interactive segmentation, our model leverages the entire space-time volume, leading to more efficient segmentation. Operating on the 4D volume, it directly provides consistent instance IDs over time and also simplifies tracking annotations. Moreover, we show that click simulations are crucial for successful model training on LiDAR point clouds. To this end, we design a click simulation strategy that is better suited for the characteristics of LiDAR data. To demonstrate its accuracy and effectiveness, we evaluate Interactive4D on multiple LiDAR datasets, where Interactive4D achieves a new state-of-the-art by a large margin.

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OCCUQ: Efficient Uncertainty Quantification for 3D Occupancy Prediction

International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2025

Autonomous driving has the potential to significantly enhance productivity and provide numerous societal benefits. Ensuring robustness in these safety-critical systems is essential, particularly when vehicles must navigate adverse weather conditions and sensor corruptions that may not have been encountered during training. Current methods often overlook uncertainties arising from adversarial conditions or distributional shifts, limiting their real-world applicability. We propose an efficient adaptation of an uncertainty estimation technique for 3D occupancy prediction. Our method dynamically calibrates model confidence using epistemic uncertainty estimates. Our evaluation under various camera corruption scenarios, such as fog or missing cameras, demonstrates that our approach effectively quantifies epistemic uncertainty by assigning higher uncertainty values to unseen data. We introduce region-specific corruptions to simulate defects affecting only a single camera and validate our findings through both scene-level and region-level assessments. Our results show superior performance in Out-of-Distribution (OoD) detection and confidence calibration compared to common baselines such as Deep Ensembles and MC-Dropout. Our approach consistently demonstrates reliable uncertainty measures, indicating its potential for enhancing the robustness of autonomous driving systems in real-world scenarios.

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